Husbands Who Share Housework Have Less Sex

Husbands who help out with household chores have less sex than men in so-called "traditional" marriages where housework is done exclusively by the wife, researchers from the USA and Spain reported in the journal American Sociological Review.
In faithful relationships, the wife whose husband is involved in housework obviously has less sex too, the authors added.

This latest study contradicts most previous ones, which tended to imply that married men generally have more sex in exchange for doing housework. However, those studies did not take into account which chores the husbands did.

The researchers, all sociologists, said that their study demonstrated that sex is not a bargaining chip in marriage. Rather, it is associated with the kinds of chores each partner completes.

Married couples reported greater sexual frequency if the women did the cooking, cleaning and shopping and the men did the gardening, electrics and plumbing, car maintenance and paid the bills.

Co-author Julie Brines, professor of sociology at the University of Washington, said:

"The results show that gender still organizes quite a bit of everyday life in marriage. In particular, it seems that the gender identities husbands and wives express through the chores they do also help structure sexual behavior."

Lead author, Sabino Kornrich, warned that men should not assume from these findings that they should not become involved in traditionally female household tasks, such as shopping, cleaning or cooking. "Men who refuse to help around the house could increase conflict in their marriage and lower their wives' marital satisfaction."

The researchers gathered and examined data from a national survey of approximately 4,500 heterosexual married couples in the USA who took part in the National Survey of Families and Households. The survey, the largest to measure sexual frequency among married couples, included data from 1992 to 1994.

Brines does not believe that the division of household chores - which in this study did not include child care - and sex have changed much since 1994.

"Traditional female tasks" include shopping, cleaning, looking after the kids, and cooking

According to the study, husbands and wives spent an average of 34 hours each week on traditionally female chores. The men's average age was 46, and the women's 44. The couples spent an extra 17 hours each week on "men's work".

On average, the males were involved in about one-fifth of traditionally female chores, and slightly more than half of male-type work. The researchers found that women tend to be more involved with helping out in traditionally male chores, than men do with female tasks.

The couples reported having sex approximately five times, on average, during the four weeks before the survey. In marriages where the woman carried out all the traditionally female tasks, the couples had sex 1.6 times as often, compared to couples where the man was involved in all the female chores.

Brines says she is not surprised that there was more sex among the traditional couples. "If anything surprised us, it was how robust the connection was between a traditional division of housework and sexual frequency." Brines is an expert in family and household dynamics.

The following possible explanations for their findings were ruled out by the researchers:

• Male coercive behavior played no role, because women reported similar satisfaction levels in their sex lives in both types of households (traditional or "modern")
  
• In two-income households, the difference in sexual frequency was still driven by male behavior regarding traditional female chores. Also, the wife's income had no impact on sexual frequency.
  
• The following had no impact on sexual frequency - gender ideology, religion, and happiness in marriage.

Brines said:

"Marriage today isn't what it was 30 or 40 years ago, but there are some things that remain important. Sex and housework are still key aspects of sharing a life, and both are related to marital satisfaction and how spouses express their gender identity."

Recovery from Workload Influenced by Housework and Leisure Activity Balance

How rapidly and effectively male and female spouses recover from the burdens of work is probably influenced by a balance of housework time and leisure time, a study by experts from the University of Southern California reported in the Journal of Family Psychology.

Over half of all married couples in the USA are two-income households. The authors wondered whether the winner was the one who had the most help with the housework.

They found that what seems to be good for the male partner was bad for the female, but what is good for the female does not have enough of an impact on the male.

In another study involving 17,000 people in 28 countries, researchers from George Mason University found that married men did less housework than live-in boyfriends. The study was published in the Journal of Family Issues.

Harm Caused By Bullying, Whether Online Or Off

Children who are bullied online or by mobile phone are just as likely to skip school or consider suicide as kids who are physically bullied, according to a study led by a Michigan State University criminologist.

The findings, published in the International Criminal Justice Review, suggest parents, school officials and policymakers should consider bullying experiences both on and offline when creating anti-bullying policies and procedures.

"We should not ignore one form of bullying for the sake of the other," said Thomas Holt, associate professor of criminal justice. "The results suggest we should find ways to develop school policies to combat bullying within the school environment and then figure out how to translate that to the home, because the risk goes beyond the schoolyard."

The study is one of two new research papers from MSU scholars dealing with cyberbullying. The other study, led by Saleem Alhabash in the Department of Advertising and Public Relations, suggests positive online comments are an effective way to fight cyberbullying.

Holt and colleagues, using survey data from more than 3,000 third- through 11th-grade students in Singapore, analyzed the relationships between physical bullying, cyberbullying and mobile phone bullying on skipping school and suicidal thoughts. The study, one of the first to explore bullying in Southeast Asia, echoes research findings from the United States and Canada.

According to the study, 22 percent of students who were physically bullied skipped school or thought about skipping. By comparison, 27 percent of students who were bullied online (which includes email, blogs and chat rooms) and 28 percent who were sent bullying text messages on a mobile phone skipped school or thought about skipping.

Similarly, 22 percent of students who were physically bullied reported suicidal thoughts, while 28 percent of those who reported cyberbullying and 26 percent who were bullied via cell phone said they considered suicide.

In addition, females and younger students were more likely to consider suicide, which reflects other research findings.

Holt said parents should pay attention to warning signs of bullying such as mood changes, sadness, school failures, social withdrawal and a lack of appetite.

When it comes to cyberbullying, he said "careful supervision of youth activity online, including the use of filtering software, can help reduce the likelihood that the child is targeted by bullies via the Web."

Managing the child's mobile phone use is encouraged, Holt said, although there is evidence kids are less likely to report this type of bullying for fear of losing their phone.

"Thus," he said, "parents must carefully educate their children on the risk of bullying victimization via mobile phones and ensure that they can speak to one or both parents about negative experiences."

Mothers Who Are Affectionate, Less Controlling During Play Have Strongest Relationships With Their Children

Researchers long have evaluated the roles parents play in children's development. Now, researchers at the University of Missouri have found that mothers' directiveness, the extent to which they try to control the content and pace of young children's play, varies based on the children's ages and the mothers' ethnicities. In addition, the study found that the more directive the mothers were during play, the less engaged children were with them and the more negative emotion the children displayed toward their mothers.

"Children flourish when they have opportunities to make choices about what they do, particularly in play situations," said Jean Ispa, lead author of the study and professor of human development and family studies at MU. "Mothers who are highly directive do not allow that kind of choice. In our study, the children were playing with some toys, and the very directive mothers were making the decisions about how to play, what to play and how quickly to play."

For example, during play with her child, a highly directive mother might make her toddler put the plastic cow in the toy barn through the barn's door instead of through its window. If a child is playing with a pretend kitchen set, the mom might not let the child touch the fake burners on the stove. Mothers often think they are helping their children by correcting them, but they are limiting the children's creativity and possibly making their children enjoy being with them less, Ispa said.

"It's often noted that European-American mothers are less directive generally than African-American and Mexican-American mothers, and that's also what we found," Ispa said. "When children were only a year old, on average, African-American mothers were the most directive, Mexican-American mothers were second and European-American mothers were third. As children got older, mothers of all ethnicities displayed less directiveness."

When mothers were highly directive during playtime, children expressed less positive regard for their moms and more negative feelings toward them, Ispa said. The researchers also evaluated how affectionate the mothers were to their children and found that higher levels of warmth reduced the negative effects of directiveness.

"Even if mothers were very directive, if they were also warm, the negative effects of high directiveness lessened in every one of the ethnic groups we studied," Ispa said. "If mothers were negative or seemed critical of their kids, then the negative effects of directiveness increased."

To benefit their children's development, mothers should show affection to their children while supporting their play and being careful to limit the extent to which they dictate exactly how their children should play, Ispa said.

"We know that children, regardless of culture, need to feel loved," said Ispa. "Children take in the meaning of what their mothers are trying to do, so if a mom is being very directive and is generally a very warm person, I think the child feels, 'My mom is doing this because she cares about me, and she's trying to do the best for me.' If that warmth is missing, then the child might feel, 'My mom is trying to control me, and I don't like it.'"

Ispa and her colleagues used pre-recorded videos to analyze pairs of mothers and children interacting in play environments when the children were 1, 2, 3 and 5 years old. The mothers and children in the study all participated in the Early Head Start Research and Evaluation project, a federal study of Early Head Start, a nationwide program designed to help the cognitive, social and emotional development of children from low-income families.

Those Who Help Others Derive Significant Health Benefits Not Available To Recipients

A five-year study by researchers at three universities has established that providing tangible assistance to others protects our health and lengthens our lives.

This, after more than two decades of research failed to establish that the same benefits accrue to the recipients of such help.

Principal investigator Michael J. Poulin, PhD, assistant professor of psychology at the University at Buffalo, says, "This study offers a significant contribution to the research literature on the relationship between social environment and health, and specifically to our understanding of how giving assistance to others may offer health benefits to the giver by buffering the negative effects of stress."

Poulin, along with colleagues at Stony Brook University and Grand Valley State University, produced the study, "Giving to Others and the Association Between Stress and Mortality," which was recently posted online by the American Journal of Public Health, which will publish the study in an upcoming print issue.

The authors point out that although it is established that social isolation and stress are significant predictors of mortality and morbidity, 20 years of studies and meta-analytical review have failed to establish that receiving social support from others buffers recipients against mortality after exposure to psychosocial stress.

"As the title of our study indicates," Poulin says, "we tested the hypothesis that providing help to others would predict a reduced association between stress and mortality for the helpers. Specifically, over the five years of the study, we found that when dealing with stressful situations, those who had helped others during the previous year were less likely to die than those who had not helped others," he says.

The study's 846 subjects, all from the Detroit, Mich., area, completed baseline interviews that assessed stressful events they had experienced in the previous year and whether they had provided tangible assistance to friends or family members in the past year.

Self-reported stressful experiences included such things as serious, non-life-threating illness, burglary, job loss, financial difficulties or death of a family member.

Respondents also reported the total amount of time in the past 12 months they had spent helping friends, neighbors or relatives who did not live with them by providing transportation, doing errands and shopping, performing housework, providing child care and other tasks.

"When we adjusted for age, baseline health and functioning and key psychosocial variables," Poulin says, "the Cox proportional hazard models (the most widely used method of survival analysis) for mortality revealed a significant interaction between helping behavior, stressful events, morbidity and mortality.

"Our conclusion," he says, "is that helping others reduced mortality specifically by buffering the association between stress and mortality.

"These findings go beyond past analyses to indicate that the health benefits of helping behavior derive specifically from stress-buffering processes," Poulin says, "and provide important guidance for understanding why helping behavior specifically may promote health and, potentially, for how social processes in general may influence health."